Hello guys, welcome. This is my first article here so I’ll introduce myself. I’m Jim Harbor; you may know me from my articles on deepspacetransmissions.com or perhaps my stuff on 4chan. I’m here to talk about Multiversity.
8 years in the making ,the book is a full on arpeggio of everything DC. A collection of six original 40 page novels with a two part story bookending them, Multiversity takes us through the highs and lows of 80 years of Comicdom. Written by Grant Morison with an all-star team of artists, the metaseries came packed with a fully detailed Map of the DC Multiverse, my ongoing guide to which can be found here. So in honor of both the past works of Morrison, dc, comics in general and the annotators who have come before me, let’s take a deep look into Multiversity #1
Covers
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| The Multiversity #1:Grant Morrison, Joe Prado, Ivan Reis, Nei Ruffino |
Lots of fun variants here.
The first Cover, from Ivan Reis and Joe Prado details the Stars of The Multiversity, the Universe Crossing Team that is the focus of this issue. President Calvin Ellis of Earth-23, and (though not appearing on this book) Mary Marvel of Earth-5 and Abin Sur, the Green Lantern of Earth-20. Along the side is the cool spectra breakdown of the world featured here.
Earth-0 is Prime Earth, the setting of the main New 52 DC comics
Earth-5 is based on the original Fawcett Comics, from which DC bought Shazam and that book's Marvel family.
Earths 7 and 8, as you'll see here are based on Marvel Comics
Earth-11 Is a world where the characters genders are swapped
Earth-16 is a play on the Bob Haney Supersons; a utopia where the teen children of Earths heroes live as vapid celebrities
Earth-23 is a world where black heroes are more prominent, and Calvin Ellis, a hero themed on Barrack Obama and Mohamed Ali, is Superman.
Earth-26 is the world of the Zoo Crew, a funny cartoon animal world of superheroes
Earth-36 is a “watered-down” version of DC Comics that was mentioned briefly in Grant Morrison’s previous comic Action Comics vol 2 #9
Earth-41 as you’ll see, is themed after the books of the classic Image Comics
Earth -42 is the world of the chibi-fied “Lil’ Leaguers”
And Earth-44 is the home of the robotic Metal Men created by Justice Consortium
The next cover is the same as the first but in Black and White
Chris Burnham’s cover is a remake of the front of Action Comics #1 the first anyone saw of Superman. This one is in the style of the cartoony animal land of the Zoo Crew, populated with villains from that book.
Bryan Hitch’s Cover is part of the History of the Multiverse series, detailing The Flash of Two Worlds, they very first DC Multiverse story (more on that below)
The next cover is by Grant Morrison himself, who did comic art way back in the day and still sketches and outlines most of his books. This is a zoom in on Thunderer, a core character in this book from Earth-7 with a begoggled Leatherwing (Batman’s Nazi Analog from Earth-10) in the background.
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| Seven Soldiers Zatanna#1: Grant Morrison, JH Williams III, Ryan Sook, Mick Gray, Nathan Eyring,Jared K. Fletcher |
Note the M logo made of 52 Earths. M is kind of an arc letter for Morrison, and not just because of his name. M-Theory is a rubric of the Multiverse that Morrison let influence his works. The Map published for this series conflated The Bleed, DC Comics' “Space Between Spaces” of the Multiverse, with the Bulk of M Theory, and the various universes with it’s Branes. The fun part about M-Theory is that, as stated theories own inciter Edward Witten; the M can stand for whatever you want. Membrane, Mystery, Magic, Meta, Morrison and so on. A lot of the ideas of this series are pulled from or otherwise conflated with M Theory, so the “MV” logo of the series fits well into that.
Page 1
The concept of insectoid like vermin and incursions is one popular through Grant’s wok. The higher dimension insect machines from The Invisibles, The Creepy Crawly Sheeda with their Spider steeds from Seven Soldiers, Braniac as the Collector of Worlds from his Action Comics… the list goes on.
Of note is the parasitic relationship at work here. Things living on things and living off things is a concept worked heavily in Grant’s Cosmology. The Monitors, self-tasked with running the Multiverse, saw the beings of the DC Comic universes as germs after all. (And to drive the joke home this is the head of a LANDLADY). Note that the rent is Eight Hundred dollars (8 being an ongoing motif in these books) and that the rent, like comic books and menstrual cycles, comes monthly.
Speaking of 8s, this page has 8 panels (with a 9th “ghost” panel). 8s work to the musical themes of the book such as Octaves while 9 calls back the grid of Watchmen, the seminal Graphic Novel that aped the EC Comics grid style that Grant will play with in Pax Americana .
Page 2
That “knocking at the door” line will become important later.
This is Nix Uotan, the last of the Monitors, beings that overlook the Multiverse and have as their mandate the preservation of the order of things (they’re kinda bad at their job.) There originally was one Monitor and his counterpart the Anti-Monitor who battled against each other in Crisis on Infinite Earths, an event that saw the death of the DC Multiverse. Sometime after then, an entire race of Monitors had sprung up. After Final Crisis, Nix is the last of that new race. That book's end saw him living in an apartment as a seemingly normal human. We now see what’s he’s been doing. Reading comics books. An apt comparison for his role as “monitor” that directly correlates that race to us readers (which was a strong message of Final Crisis) the stuffed monkey coupled with the Advil and Zoloft (A to Z in a classic literary pun) implies the events that follows are going to be Ozian. (“You were there, and you were there…”) Is it a dream or isn’t it (of course it’s a dream but thats what MAKES it real), but the fact he’s reading a comic book that he himself is in right now must be quite weird. Advil is a pain reliever and Zoloft is an antidepressant. And what cures pain and depression more than superheroes?
David Uzumeri notes this is the SAME apartment from the end of Final Crisis which means he hasn’t moved in like six years. (His lack of Monitoring action may explain DC’s generally choppy straights since that book ended.)
The Rubix cube is a reference to Final Crisis again. The “God Number” of a Rubik’s Cube is 18, you can’t solve a maximally randomized (Gmo missed that part the last time) in any numbers less. But in Final Crisis, thanks to Metron, the Wisdom Lord of the New Gods it was solved in 17, thus becoming a Mother Box, the do anything devices from the New Gods’ Fourth world.
Comic Books come out of Wednesday, which is named for Odin/Wodan/Wedne the writer/magic god who inspired both Nix Uoatan's name and aspect of Metron’s archetype.
Nix talking about comic books on the internet. (With Comic and Television writer JMS apparently) is a direct comparison between the comics fans like us to Monitor and observe the comics, and the Monitor’s a race whose job is to oversee the Multiverse. Morrison has often compared the Monitors to folks of the real world, especially in Final Crisis, where it showed they fed off the Multiverse, like Vampires, akin to our modern consumption of the superhero books.
He’s also using headphones (which is why he can’t hear his landlady)music is an overarching theme in this series, owing to the conflation of the vibrational nature of reality (as seen in Quantum Mechanics and M Theory) with DC Comics. Music, like the rainbow works on a vibrational spectrum (this was deliberate on Newton’s part his esotericism lead him to make Apohenic style connections like we do, that’s why he has one tertiary color [indigo] on a spectrum of primaries and secondaries, he wanted seven colors to match up to the musical scale)
Nix is reading Ultra Comics, a haunted book set in our universe that comes out six months or so from now. The cover is a direct homage the Fourthwall Breaking front of The Flash #163 (which was remade as the cover for the all-star DC Comics Presents: The Flash #1 ) That book has The Flash almost disappear when people stopped believing in him. The themes of Ideas becoming reality are ones constantly evoked through Grant work, and I would argue, human history in general.
Ultra Comics is named for Ultraa, who in the Original Stories of Our Earth from DC, was shown to the one hero from our world (until the introduction of Superboy Prime) He was an alien from a distant world raised by Indigenous Australians. Aborigine culture is common interest to Morrison as we’ll all see for sure later on here.
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| Lunarplanner.com: Nick Anthony Fiorenza |
He’s also using headphones (which is why he can’t hear his landlady)music is an overarching theme in this series, owing to the conflation of the vibrational nature of reality (as seen in Quantum Mechanics and M Theory) with DC Comics. Music, like the rainbow works on a vibrational spectrum (this was deliberate on Newton’s part his esotericism lead him to make Apohenic style connections like we do, that’s why he has one tertiary color [indigo] on a spectrum of primaries and secondaries, he wanted seven colors to match up to the musical scale)
Nix is reading Ultra Comics, a haunted book set in our universe that comes out six months or so from now. The cover is a direct homage the Fourthwall Breaking front of The Flash #163 (which was remade as the cover for the all-star DC Comics Presents: The Flash #1 ) That book has The Flash almost disappear when people stopped believing in him. The themes of Ideas becoming reality are ones constantly evoked through Grant work, and I would argue, human history in general.
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| The Flash vol 1 #163: Carmine Infantino, Joe Giella, John Broome |
Note the billing putting Chris, the books colorist, on the front. Part of DC Comics new royalty plan is that Colorists get top billing something long overdue at the company for people who make some of the best works pop. (Imagine All-Star Superman without the lush digital color work of Jamie Grant, or the Cell Shaded glory of Gotham Academy without Romain Gaschet's eye popping paints)
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The dissecting of comics such as Grant Morrison’s has become a bit of a pastime of folks such as myself. Notice that Morrison uses the term LIVE dissection, the idea that the book and the DC Universe are living breathing things. This is because the DCU’s status as a system being constantly updated modified and tweaked through the years has given it consciousness. This concept is Panpsychism and you can see it manifested in things like the “Invisible Hand” of the economy.
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| Grant Morrison "Interview:" Jeff Lester |
There’s that door again. If I wanted to be overly pedantic, a possible translation of “D” and “C” is “Door to Conflict or “Door to Crisis,” if you want to sound cool. (The C, glyph beeing from the old symbol for weapon or conflict) Our letters are in truth the millennium long distorted graphic images of our ancient forbearers.The Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cryllic, Latin ,Coptic, and countless other writings systems used today ultimately are descended from Kemetic Heirgylphcs(itself a direct Greek translation of the Egyptian "Sacred Letters") , just as the Japanese, Korean and Chinese systems are ultimately descended from Oracle Bone glyphs. Our modern languages then are just hyper graphiczed forms of the original sequential art. Living sigils if you will. Ancient "picture books" as the primal ancestor to all of our written literature.
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| Nile Valley Contributions to Civilization: Anthony Browder |
And now we have Stubbs coming alive from the toy in a Barney like fashion. Stubbs is a monkey, a reference to the idea that given infinite time and/or monkeys they would write any given work of literature. The typewriting Monkey as a concept has shown up previously in Animal Man and again in Final Crisis. There's no telling if these are all the same Monkey, but they definitely stem from the same concept. The Pirate garb is a callback to the idea of “raiding” “harvesting” or else “farming.” These ideas of feeding off comic books or other worlds run deep through Grant’s work. That’ll become relevant when we get to the Gentry.
Next is the cool bit of metafiction where we see the captions are talking to us, and they’re not exactly nice. If you DO look ahead to the end you’ll see Nix answering the question of who is at the door (A good bit of planning). The idea that this is all perception plays well into the Death of the Author style insight that us readers (and Nix as a metaphor for us) do to the books how much of this is in the book and how much is the product of our fevered imagination rotted (or is it fermented) on to many comic books? And of course we’re just bait for the ultimate evils here. This is a haunted comic book after all.
And the page fades to white, leading us to the next page…
Page 4
And a kickass full splash of Nix.
First of all calling back to the musical themes, this set up played off of a classic comic technique that Chris Sims calls Kirbyscope. That page has a lot of examples and variations and I’m sure you can think up more, but the basic concept is panelpanelpanelpanel...SPLASH. This is akin to the lead before a Bass drop in a song. It’s a very common motif in human rhythm in general. A lot of first time comic writers wind up doing instinctively. A staccato leading up to a big blast (speaking of Kirby, that’s how he set up his Mother Boxes and the boom tubes, it’d go pingpingpingping BOOM)
Superjudge is Nix’s superhero name, a play off his title as “The Judge of All Evil” moniker he bore in Final Crisis. The idea of us reader as monitors or judges is what's put across here, our constant critique analysis and breakdown of these books personified. There's a reason why the original sketches for Nix gave him a 3-D halo of computer screens/comic panels and dubbed him the Superhero of the Information Age.
The bio blurb for Nix is one that’s shows up in DC Comics from time to time, mostly notably with Superman and his family titles. A major theme of the books aorund Final Crisis was that the Monitors were being influenced by the worlds they observed, just as the books we read influence us(one of them even turned into a Giraffe), Nix's time as a Multivesal Guardian has made him go full Superhero
The outfit with its classic Jim Lee Nehru collar, belays what Grant said about this series. That even though the mainline Earth-0 canon doesn’t show up that much, the design choices of this era are reflected throughout. Imagine 52 imaginary Jim Lees all doing redesigns for each of these universes, and you get the idea.
The comics scattered in the background are The Just # 1, the Burnham Alternate of this very Comic and the Grant Morrison sketches we saw photoshopped as an alternate (the fact Nix has those further drives home his status as an author analog)
The Engines of the Ultima Thule (more on that next page) are spewing Kirby Dots as an exhaust, but in a more organic, flowing, bleeding art style.
We’re seeing this through the eyes of the Monkey, a change of perspective that pushes us out of the “real world” and into the fantasy, a point in the book befitting the BOOM of the Kirbyscope bass drop.
The infernal forces that are the captions tell you to stop reading, if you do you’ll be “safe” but if you choose to read on, you’ll see they tell you to keep reading, no matter what you do, you obey.
Page 5
With the membranes between realities melting, the fires from the cover burning the guy on the front of Ultra Comics are leaking off the page. And we have the monkey sidekick make a tongue in cheek joke or two at the reader expense. Should we be reading comics at this age? (The answer is yes)
The Ultima Thule is a shiftship, a concept borrowed from Warren Ellis’ The Authority, of a vessel that travels the Multiverse. The musical piloting system is Morrison’s (dig the warped notes , this is a world “out of tune”) and The Pirate Monkey’s playing up of the nautical themes is an added bit of fun, given the Original Shiftship from Ellis book's was called The Carrier and so Morrison expanded it into an entire Multiversal fleet. (Destroyers, Tankers etc.) Its name comes from a term meaning “Beyond the Limits.” “Thule” itself was the name for a mythic island to the North, whose name has never had a firm origin. By conflation it came to mean “Norther than North” or “Past the limits” And thus showed up on maps a lot for when the “Fringes” were. It’s a fitting name for a ship that breaks the forth wall.
And of course, its design is a callback to the Yellow Submarine from The Beatles Cartoon. Always the Britophile Grant…
The Thule belonged to Zillo Valla, Nix’s mother who was named for Shalla-Bal, the lost love of the Silver Surfer; apt given the world she Monitored was a Marvel pastiche.
Speaking of Marvel…
Page 6.
This is Earth-7 a send up of the Ultimate Marvel comics. Ultimate Marvel, a Bill Jemas brainchild for a sort of “Ground Zero” Marvel U from scratch, was a pretty bright star in it time before eventually to falling the wayside. Just as the Wildstorm Universe before it (which was a major inspiration, especially via the former Morrison protégé and Authority writer Mark Millar) because it was a separate universe, you could “raise the stakes” by having characters die, go evil or raise huge world devastating bodycounts. Most notably in the snuff film disguised as a comic that as Ultimatum and the several huge world wrecking events sense then (such as Cataclysm) This is why Morrison describes this world in the Earth Bios as a place “Where there was intelligence and vibrancy, now only madness and death remains." Around we can see deformed pastiches of Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, The Invisible Woman and the Human Torch, coupled with a blazing hellsun visually similar to the Firestorm matrix the Justice Leagues were trapped in it he recent Forever Evil series.
Page 7.
With the Multiverse being seen music, a world “out of tune” is a strong condemnation.This isnt the first time Grant's jabbed Marvel for being "out of tune" in Final Crisis Superman Beyond: 3D, a series that was in many ways a backdoor pilot to this one; we come across a DC send-up of the Marvel Universe, with characters and events spoofing the then recent Civil War and Secret Invasion storylines in the books; both of which had heroes fighting heroes.
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| Final Crisis Superman Beyond 3D #1 : Grant Morrison, Doug Mahnke,Christian Alamy, Rodney Ramos, Tom Nguyen, Walden Wong, David Baron, Steve Wands |
Here we see the Superteam of Earth-7, a pastiche of Marvels’ The Ultimates. (The design on their American CrUSAder as an Ultimate Captain America analog is notably spot on).
The character seen here is The Thunder, based on a previous pastiche of Thor called Wandjina. Morrison, ever intrigued by Australian Dreamtime religion, has brought him back, but as an actual aborigine. (Anther hallmark of the Ultimate Comics was there relevant diversity compared to the mainstream Marvel). This also gives us yet another example of the semi-accidental “Black People with electricity powers” meme that runs through comics.
The Wandjina drawings were of notable interest to Morrison as the way they are made, generations repainting over past drawings with each one taking a gradually different style, is a great metaphor to the ongoing development and rebooting of the comics industry. The icon on his chest is a stylized Wandjina image, two eyes, white face and no mouth as per tradition. It’s actually considered dangerous and/or sacrilegious by some to draw a Wandjina without being a set member of the shaman’s allowed to do so, as their power may have unintended consequence on the physical world. Dreamtime as a cosmology based on the confluence of imagination, time and reality has been a wellspring of influence on comic writers, from Grant Morrison to Neil Gaiman to Warren Ellis and beyond.
And of course, Thunderer didn’t send that SOS, like the captions said before, IT’S BAIT!
Page 8
Bait for the Gentry! As others have noted that name brings up connotations, mostly of land owning feudal lords. The fact that this book opened up with a Land Lady drives that home, and in general, themes of owning and harvesting of culture have propped up in Morrison’s works since his early days. The Sheeda being a great example with their constant strip mining and harrowing of the past to feed their future. Or the sentient Multi-universal Hexus corporation from Marvel Boy, a series whose musical structure was a forerunner to this ones. The Monitors as well were shown as vampires, and the Map shows they have huge Derricks to suck out The Bleed, the lifeblood of the multiverse as well as massive tankers that recall Oil Giants such as BP.
The design of this villain visually recalls the previous Morrison villain Solaris as well as the thematically similar Antigod the Unmaker from Doom patrol. Grant loves his giant eyes.
Page 9
Notice how things get serious once Stubbs holds his wisecracking
Nix is called “Supergod” now, a direct reference to Grant Morrison book Supergods and his ongoing conflation of heroes with gods of old myth (God literally means “One who is called upon” after all). Also notice how the dialogue being said to Nix. "Turn back, go!” echoes the captions us readers were given, telling us to stop reading.
The bizarre and disjointed dialogue of the Gentry here is decayed, broken down form of speech. They’re harrowing the stories of other worlds and their very dialogue shows that they’re toxic to language itself .
And of course, the speech bubbles here aren’t tied to any character by mouth, driving home the other worldly omnipresence of the Gentry and forming a direct relation to the captions from before. They're front here, significantly has no mouth.
Page 10
And now we see the goals of The Gentry, to ruin our fun; the total death of the enjoyment the story and the corruption of the populace to mindless destroyers of creativity.
Thunder calls the Multiverse, the “Rainbow of Worlds” as you’ll see a bit later, various worlds and cultures calling the Multiverse different things is something he works on here. In this case, the Dreamtime influenced character of Thunderer calls it “The Rainbow of Worlds” recalling the Rainbow Serpent archetype from Aboriginal religions and the spectral nature of the Multiverse Morrison set up here, with the realities going from Red to Violet in the rainbow or C to B in the C Major Scale.
And now of course we see what the Gentry’s plan was. Torture Thunder and then using the comic as bait; send out an SOS a get Nix to swap places with him.
Wonder is a word whose etymological roots are ultimately unknown, but is meaning is akin to awe, something astonishingly brilliant. The line here of course is in analogy to Batman’s sidekick Robin, the Boy Wonder. Nix is after all a sort of sidekick to the DCUs as a whole.
Nix Sacrifice here mirrors the exchange Shilo Norman, the Mister Miracle had done for Aurkales, the First Superhero, back in Seven Soldiers.
That series had a Sci-Fi Christ Figure of a new "Fifth World" save an original Conan-esque Herculean myths style hero. The Old , giving itself for the new.
We see that pattern reflected here with the Super Ultra Modern Nix, the Ultimate Higher Final Concept of a hero, giving himself up to save Thunderer, a relic of an older deeper and more animist hero culture.
Nix Sacrifice here mirrors the exchange Shilo Norman, the Mister Miracle had done for Aurkales, the First Superhero, back in Seven Soldiers.
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| Seven Soldiers of Victory #1: Grant Morrison, JH Williams III, Dave Stewart, Todd Klein |
That series had a Sci-Fi Christ Figure of a new "Fifth World" save an original Conan-esque Herculean myths style hero. The Old , giving itself for the new.
We see that pattern reflected here with the Super Ultra Modern Nix, the Ultimate Higher Final Concept of a hero, giving himself up to save Thunderer, a relic of an older deeper and more animist hero culture.
Page 11
Again with the Rainbow talk from Thunderer. The “Invisible Rainbow” as he phrases it jells most with the Source Wall, the ultimate end of everything first postulated by Jack Kirby and later developed by Walt Simonson and Chris Claremont; on the Morrison/Hughs map it’s portrayed as a rainbow yet again driving home the spectral themes
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| The Map of the Multiverse: Grant Morrison, Rian Hughes |
Again going back to the Map, the House of Heroes is literally at the heart of the Orrery, the massive network of 52 Worlds that is the core of the DC Multiverse. The term Orrery of Worlds goes back to Morrison‘s mind-bending British Comics Zenith, which also dealt with Multiversal shenanigans. The idea of the Multiverse as an Orrery, a machine rotating in harmony calls back the classic deist clockwork models of realities ; all orbitals and spheres and Musica universalis , the idea that reality is made up of a harmonious interworking of sphere and orbits. This is echoed by the map, which is s series of spheres orbiting within eachother.
Speaking of the map, it places the Monitor sphere above the God sphere, making Nix literally Beyond a God. “Super’s” etymological roots being “over” as in above and beyond” so Nix literally is a “Supergod.”
Nix says “fifty worlds” he could just be rounding but with Earth-7 burnt out and the heroes of Earth-33 (our world) being only fictional it could be a literal claim.
Page 12
And here’s where things get really off the wall. Nix is touching the edge of his panel themselves. The Extra dimensional Gentry are attacking Nix with the very comicbook he is in. You can even see the panel borders get more solid as Nix is trapped even tighter.
Dame Merciless puns on the poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” another work of verse that is octivly themed, each line had eight syllables. A poem focuses on the interpolation of love and death fitting for a skimpily dressed corpse woman. "Dame" probably came to the attention of britophile Grant Morrison through the John Keats poem, itself a remake of the french original by the Frenchmen Alain Chartier. Both poems focus on the nature of life and love and its conflation and confrontation with death, making a fitting namesake for such a character.
Hell Machine's name evokes a diabolical engine of pain and suffering, a foil to the Orrey that is the multiverses, a demonized industrialization.
Lord Broken’s twisting nature belays a sort of Bad Architecture, death by design. Even his name is missing a letter, just as faulty as its shaky planks.
Demogorgunn is a play on the Demogorgon
A medieval meme of a primordial demon whose very name shouldn’t be spoken. An imaginary pagan god, constructed by various Christian and esoteric sources. The idea of an evil idea, a work of fiction working its way through countless writers through the ages, but one of chaos and death, works well with the esoteric ideas Grant plays with here, He’s also Demon prince from Dungeons and Dragons, and given the Gygaxian influences on the Multiverse Map, I doubt it didn't come up in Grant's research.
Intellectron merges “Intellect” with ‘Electron’ He’s the apparent brain of the bunch and his design with the arcs of tendril lightning-neurons evokes weaponized thought. Evil Ideas.
Evil ideas the lot of them.
And of course between the five of them and the Monster that IS Ultra Comics, we could easily fit one of each of the gentry into one of the books that make up this series. (For example compare the massive boundless flesh-thing that is Demogorgunn to the Zombie villains of the upcoming Society of Super-Heroes.)
The Gentry themselves are cut off by the panels, emphasizing there otherworldliness and how space itself is being folded in on them, punctuated with a perspective shot of Nix’s hand were the readers would be ,driving home the idea that we the audience are the ones being attacked just as much as Superjudge is. We're facing monsters beyond time and space, the medium itself is straining to display them in all there sheer glory and horror.
Page 13
We see Nix recoil in horror from the touch we saw in the perspective bent shot from the last page, notice how Nix and Stubb’s are having their panel literally consumed by the expanse of Dame Merciless or how Lord Broken is incapable of not being cut off by his own panel borders. Comics by their nature artistically mix time and space, so using the panels to show the world bending powers of the Gentry is right up the alley for Grant and Ivan.
The Anti-Death Equation is a classic “include and transcend" extension of an old DC Concept. Jack Kirby in his New Gods saga had the Anti-Life Equation as the ultimate McGuffin, the ability to subsume all will other than one into an inescapable void, total death of agency. Darkseid's quest for the Equation would form the impetus for the Fourth World Saga, and what he did once he got it was the basis for Grants earlier Final Crisis. While the Life Equation, Free Will, was personified in Jack Irby’s Mr. Miracle Character (and the Morrison successor to the title Shilo Norman) the Anti-death Equation is a new one. The idea of endless dying and being reborn in a constant cycle of hellish bad ends is one that Morrison previously used with his “Omega Sanction” which showed up in his Mr. Miracle Series as well as Batman. A kind of weaponized story, it respawned its victims like a video game in a cycle of hellish reincarnation. Mr. Miracle and Batman escaped there's, we have yet to see if Nix can do the same.
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| Batman vol 1 #702: Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel, Ian Hannin,Travis Lanham |
There's also the fun way to read into it as a sort of dark pastiche of being a comic character in the first place, never being allowed to have your story end and being set upon by constant infinite reboots and revamps. While Morrison usually showed this type of immortality as a good thing, a grand cosmic continuity in the vein of the Australian Cave paintings, he’s touched on this darkside as well, most notably in the end of his seminal Batman run on Batman Inc. #2 Vol 13. There are no dualities only symmetries after all.
As Nix is getting crushed, he speaks in terms of Scale and Perspective. They very artistic elements of the book that are being broken down right now. The Gentry, being beyond the scope of normal comics characters, have weaponized the very format of the book against him and now we see the same creepy crawlies from the opening showing back up, Nix being covered in this parasitic wave
And with fictionality breaking down Nix “wakes up” into his "real world." The use of the term “game” is notable here, given the “Weapon" we see Nix going for is his Rubix’s cube (along with the drugs). Games as metaphor for plot events is a style Grant worked with back in Batman.
Nix was given this cube my Metron, Avatar of thought, language and knowledge. A rubik's cube, like a comicbook, is filled with many colored panels, full of potential in numerous forms. And in DC's Cosmology, the do anything- Mother Boxes of the New gods were shown to be thw true form of the Books of Magic, the ultimate magical keystones of DC.
Nix was given this cube my Metron, Avatar of thought, language and knowledge. A rubik's cube, like a comicbook, is filled with many colored panels, full of potential in numerous forms. And in DC's Cosmology, the do anything- Mother Boxes of the New gods were shown to be thw true form of the Books of Magic, the ultimate magical keystones of DC.
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| Justice League Dark Annual #1: Jeff Lemire, Mikel Janin,Ulises Arreola, Rob Leigh |
The quintillions of positions the cube therefore are a perfect symbol for the “Ultimate Potential” devices of both comic books and the New Gods. Comic Book=Rubik's Cube=Mother Box=Book of Magic
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| Final Crisis #6:Grant Morrison, JG Jones, Carlos Pacheco, Doug Mahnke, Marco Rudy, Christain Alamy, Jesus Merino, Marco Rudy, Alex Sinclair,Pete Pantazis, Rob Clark |
And with Nix indisposed, we move into Act II…
